Microsoft’s MSN Music

I've finally gotten round to adding all the photo albums from my trip to Scotland three weeks ago. Check them out here. I've also added some photos from yesterday's sunrise, and some spectacular "spring" scenes - frozen cherry trees - taken in Ceres (the Eden of Africa) which I received via e-mail.

It looks like Microsoft are jumping onto the online music store bandwagon with their MSN Music store, which according to /. should officially launch today with the release of WMP 10. According to the /. article, you can browse the site with Mozilla, however, ActiveX is required for full functionality so IE is required to use the store. But as one reader comments, you can use the Mozilla ActiveX plug-in. Fair enough though, the site lists the minimum hardware and software requirements to play radio or purchase music from MSN so they're well aware of their intended target market. And clearly non-IE or non-Windows users aren't it.

I took the site for a quick spin in Firefox 0.9.3 (side-note: check out the redesigned Mozilla.org - vastly improved, but still area for improvement me thinks. Kudos to those involved!) and have the following feedback to report.

The first thing you'll notice is that their special characters are, well, not special characters. i.e. They're using a Ÿ reference to give Ÿ, but they should be using the proper HTML character entity reference • (unicode) or • (ISO) to give •. Sloppy!

Next is their search box:

Powerful search: Our easy-to-use music search engine will help you find music by artist, album or song title.

By default it contains the text "music search". When you click into this input box, this text disappears. Fine with that. When you click off it without typing anything, it doesn't reappear - removing all indication that this is their search box. I find that majority of sites which use this onfocus/onblur technique never replace the default text. The input box just becomes an ordinary input field with a "go" button alongside - not very helpful. Furthermore, the "go" button isn't clickable. You have to hit your <Enter> key to perform the search.

After performing a search I clicked to visit one of the results, the R.E.M. artist page. "Rate this artist" didn't work; neither do any of the song ratings. The dynamic "Read More..." link, which is supposed to expand their profile, didn't work. I then clicked to view one of their albums, 'Out Of Time'. In the "Listeners Also Liked..." box, the list is supposed to consist of an album title, followed by the artist, and then a new paragraph with a new recommendation. There are no paragraph breaks so it just appears as one big list. And then like /. noted, ActiveX is required for full functionality, so you can't listen to any of the tracks.

So nothing new there, Microsoft aren't doing themselves any favours. But do yourself a favour and check out Windows Media Player 10 - I downloaded the beta version a month or two ago but never got around to installing it. It's a 12mb download - larger than WinAMP 5 and Firefox combined, but I've always used it for video since I find Winamp sluggish in that department so it's an upgrade if anything.